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Know-it-alls
: On Jessica’s Well:
Resolved: This House (OK, this Blog) believes that the collective knowledge of the blogosphere is greater than the collective knowledge of professional journalists regardless of the subject.
Well, I could argue that today but that would be beside the point. Will we come to this tipping point (if we haven’t already)? I’d go with the affirmative, wouldn’t you? [via Michele]
I think this is true for a very simple reason: the blogosphere is likely to include an actual expert on any subject that comes up, not just a reporter who spent 15 minutes talking to an expert.
Mike: Absolutely right.
The problem is that almost nobody will hear the expert.
I mean, the collective knowledge of many (not all, but many) large groups is likely to be greater than professional journalists, but it doesn’t matter.
Remember when Kasparov played the Internet? The chessosphere voted each round for what they collectively thought was the best move, but the voices of average players swamped the voices of those most talented, and thus they lost to Kasparov.
The same sort of effect happens when the voices of intelligent bloggers are swamped by links to less intelligent bloggers who fit some vision of the blogosphere’s conventional wisdom.
Moral? A group is only as smart as its most active members.
Seth:
How right you are!
There are many threads that could use but never hear from an authority on the subject at hand. We end up with a collection of opinions offered by people who contribute just that- opinions.
Unfortunately, some of these opinions are not even based on common sense, much less on accurate, well thought out presentations.
So, the blogger/journalist wins some and the visitor wins some; all depends on the subject and who happens to be browsing the site.
Being smarter than journalists is no great honor–most bright 12-year-olds are smarter than most journalists.
Dan Z.
Your model breaks down, however, by the fact that unlike the Kasparov example, I choose what to listen to. I do not have 500,000 weblogs screaming at me (or voting for what will appear) on my monitor at any given step. Also, unlike a reporter, Kasparov is the foremost expert in his feild. In the case of the game against him, if I wanted to know the best move against him in any position that occured in his game vs the world and have the best chance of getting a correct answer!), I would ask him, not the world.
I guess in your example, it would be better to look at mass media as “the world,” and Kasparov as a good blogger, expert in his feild.
I don’t go to, say, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for expert First Amendment law analysis (even the AJC doesnt do that!). I go to Volokh.
Steve: The problem is, how do you know what to read in the first place? It’s no great trick to say that if you want expert First Amendment analysis, don’t read it from an unexpert journalist, seek out someone who knows what they are talking about. But in this situation, Volokh functions much more like a heavily-promoted conventional talking-head (deservedly) expert pundit. Nothing wrong with that. But nothing too amazing either.
Seth,
Except that, well, unlike a reporter, he is a professor of First Amendment Law at a major law university. And his credentials are published. Not to say he can;t be wrong, because he most certainly can, but by nature he points you to someone who disagrees with him, and defends his case. Newspapers do this where, exactly?
As for finding people like him, in any given field, it’s not terribly hard. Look at who people refer to, check out who those people link to, and you can get a good idea as to who is respected in what feilds.
It’s not rocket science, after all – and I already know a rocket scientist personally, so no need to visit Rand Simberg too often.
But wouldn’t the idea be to distill the knowledge from all the opinions (whether they are from crackpots or not), not approach it as one or two or several people have the “right” answer?
Someone, though not an expert, might have a different take on an issue that is insightful.
Hence, Collective knowledge.
I’ve said it before: There’s a great deal of information on the Web. Some of it’s even accurate.